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P OOOO R R T LLLLL A A N N DDDD I A A N N
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The Portlandian, the Internet's premier source of Tonya News
Novemvber 12, 2007 Edition - ANNUAL BIRTHDAY EDITION
(C) 2007 Portland Ice Skating Society
http://www.geocities.com/portice
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Today is Tonya's birthday, so it's time for our annual birthday
issue. Tonya is 37 today, and we hope that she has a really great
day. In this issue, we have a look at some birthday photos, go to
the opera, look at some musicians making an ass of themselves in
Tonya's name, find out about how Tonya financed a budding
Spielberg, do some coloring in, and continue our series on Tonya
video.
THE BIRTHDAY PARTY - BUT NOT TONYA'S!
To celebrate Tonya's birthday, we've uploaded some pictures of
Tonya at a birthday party some years ago - but it wasn't Tonya's
own birthday!
http://www.geocities.com/portice/haranphotos.htm#party
Confused? Well, it was actually a surprise birthday party that
Tonya organized for her fan club magazine editor Joe Haran back
in 1993. Joe tells the story in an article he wrote for the
Puppetland site in 1999:
http://www.trinitrotoluene.org/sports/haran4.html
Tonya had just moved into a new rental house after separating
from you-know-who, and had invited Joe to a housewarming party to
celebrate. But as it would turn out, the "housewarming party" was
simply a ruse to get Joe to come on over - the real party was
actually a birthday party for Joe himself.
It wasn't the only surprise that Tonya had arranged for Joe that
evening: turns out that the candles on the birthday cake were
rigged so they couldn't be blown out.
We've uploaded these pictures because we believe that they reveal
a caring, fun-loving and playful side of Tonya that the
mainstream media rarely shows. Too often Tonya is only depicted
as being cold, nasty or a dysfunctional weirdo. These photos show
that the truth is quite the opposite. Plus there's a chance to
have a look at Tonya's fantastic legs, of course!
Again, we'd like to thank Joe for sharing these with us.
TONYA - THE OPERA, IS NOW TONYA - THE ROCK OPERA
Regular readers will be aware that last year featured the debut
of an opera based on the Tonya story. Since then, things have
been busy on the opera front. According to the opera's web site,
http://www.tonyaandnancytheopera.com, excerpts from it were
performed at a conference in New York City and also at the Sing
for a Cure (MS Benefit) at Mastersingers, and at a benefit for
LitPAC at the Paradise in Boston. On June 23, 2007 it was chosen
as one of three finalists in the Opera Vista competition and
excerpts from it were performed by Opera Vista in Houston, TX on
that date. A seminar called "From Assault to Aria: Directing
Tonya & Nancy: The Opera" was presented by Meron Langsner at the
Association for Theatre in Higher Education Annual Conference in
New Orleans in July.
Now there are plans to bring it to Tonya's home town of Portland
next year, but in a radically different form. Together with
composer Michael Teoli, the opera's creators Elizabeth Searle and
Abigail Al-Doory Cross have come up with an expanded rock music
version. Teoli, who has worked on music for theater, rock bands
and over a dozen films, is currently working on the score while
Searle is expanding the libretto. TONYA & NANCY: THE ROCK OPERA
will premiere in February of 2008 at the World Trade Center
theater in Portland, OR, produced by Triangle Productions and is
scheduled to run for at least three weeks.
TONYA SAYS HELLO TO A DONKEY
The opera isn't the only item of a musical nature inspired by
Tonya. Previously we mentioned a band called "Hello Monkey" that
recorded a concept album called "Blades of Steel" about the
incident, which we couldn't find anything about. That's because
their name is actually "Hello Donkey", and yes, they do have a
web site:
http://www.hellodonkey.com
In addition to being able to order their CD, which comes with a
free comic book, "A Day in the life of Hello Donkey", you can
download a live performance of several of the songs from the
album, which also includes other skating inspired material
entitled "Ice Kastles in the Sand". Note that some of the
language is definitely "R"-rated so it may not be safe to play
this stuff at work.
Attempts to get in touch with the members of the band, which
hails from San Francisco, have not been successful, and to be
quite honest apart from a piece from the perspective of Tonya's
broken shoelace (an admittedly original idea) most of it isn't
terribly innovative. The sentiments expressed in the lyrics are
pretty much poorly-researched stereotypes (they think Oksana is
from Russia) and alot of the music sounds like a distorted mish-
mash, more akin to the most self-indulgent aspects of "prog" rock
than the "punk" they claim they sound like. It's probably okay if
you're listening while stinking drunk in a bar (like the audience
at the gig in question), but all in all, a bit half-assed and
in need of a good producer to straighten things out, so you'll
probably be better off saving your money on this one.
Get it? "Half ASSED"? "Hello DONKEY"? Oh well, we thought it was
funny anyway.
THE TONYA/NANCY SCANDAL - A PAPARAZZO'S VIEWPOINT
It seems the scandal has also resulted in another creative
effort too, though not one actually related to Tonya. This guy,
in an article from a 1994 film magazine, explains how money he
got from covering the incident financed his foray into
feature film production:
http://www.moviemaker.com/articles/item/tonya_harding_financed_my_film_3100
Pity that it sounds like the resulting film (about an abused
woman who decides to take revenge on her drug-dealer husband) was
crap, given its dismal rating by IMDB users:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117721/
LET'S PAINT THE 90'S
"Let's paint the 90's" by Jason Rekulak is a coloring and
activity book that centers on the decade in question. The book,
which comes complete with its own paint and brush set, features
numerous news and pop-culture icons from that decade, such as the
Spice Girls, Milli Vanilli, Y2K, Monica Lewinsky, and of course
Tonya:
http://www.powells.com/biblio/1594741077
http://www.quirkbooks.com/Book.aspx?BID=208
According to one article, Rekulak originally envisioned his book
being about the 1980's, but he says that when he pitched the idea
to his bosses at Quirk Books "some of the interns asked questions
like 'Who's Huey Lewis?'". "I thought, 'Maybe this isn't going to
work.'... So we bumped it up to the '90s."
Rekulak wrote the text in the book, but the illustrations are by
Brie Spangler and it was designed by his Quirk colleague, Bryn
Ashburn. In addition to the illustrations there also are
activities such as the "O. J. Simpson High-Speed Pursuit Freeway
Maze" and a "Y2K Codebreaker Challenge."
THE T-FILES: PART 6 - TAPE & DVD TRADING
We continue our series about sources for Tonya-related footage by
considering one of the oldest methods used by fans of obtaining
video of their favorite skaters - trading the stuff on physical
media.
Despite the availability of much Tonya material on the internet,
there is still alot of video out there that isn't currently
either on-line or has never been issued on commercial tapes or
DVDs. For instance, there are many people out there who do not
have the facility to digitize and upload their skating video
collections, so in such cases the only solution is to obtain it
by trading.
Sandra Loosemore's Skateweb site has a list of several tape &
disc trading sites:
http://www.frogsonice.com/skateweb/fans.shtml
There are of course, some problems with this approach, in that
for a start you have to have something to trade - not much use if
you're a "newbie" to trading. Fortunately you may be able to
trade footage of other skaters in exchange for Tonya footage.
You also have to have the facility to make copies of your
material. Then there's the cost of postage (which can get
expensive in the case of international transactions) - and also
the danger of unscrupulous traders ripping you off. So care has
to be taken to establish the reputation of whom you dealing with.
A couple of other points to note. Firstly, there are technical
differences between the TV systems used in various different
countries, and tapes in particular may not be compatible. For
instance, there are three major TV systems in use throughout the
world: NTSC (mainly used in North America and Japan), PAL (mainly
used in Britain, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand) and
SECAM (used in France, Eastern Europe and parts of the Middle
East). Although it is possible to have recordings electronically
converted, this is expensive and inevitably results in a quality
drop. Fortunately, this isn't as big a problem as it used to be
for Tonya's fans as most of her stuff is NTSC, and most video
equipment sold outside the States in the past ten years is multi-
system and can play NTSC tapes and discs anyway, but it may be a
problem if you're a foreigner sending material in trade to
someone in the U.S. where multisystem equipment is much less
common. That PAL tape of that BBC Torvill & Dean interview may
not play too well on a VCR is Boise, Idaho, for instance, so make
sure both you and the person you're dealing with know exactly
what they're getting.
The other big problem is "generation loss" - the inevitable drop
in quality that results when doing analog copying, particularly
with consumer video formats like VHS which was never designed
with this in mind. Again, however, we're fortunate in that DVDs
have thankfully eliminated this problem, because they're digital
so each copy is identical to its source.
Despite these obstacles, trading is certainly an option worth
considering. We ourselves got a quite interesting collection of
1990's tabloid TV items about Tonya back a few years ago in
exchange for some footage of the 1996 U.S. Nationals that
strangely enough screened on NZ TV but not in the States.
Tonyaphiles are fortunate in that Tonya skated in an era when
skating coverage was reasonably plentiful and VCRs had become
common household items. Much of the footage recorded has since
been made available in various ways by fans. In this respect
we're far better off than the poor fans of Peggy Fleming or
Dorothy Hamill, who seem to have to make do with mainly a handful
of bleary-looking transfers of worn-out old 16mm movies. For fans
of these skaters, that faded, scratchy "grindhouse" look isn't a
retro-type artistic statement, it's just a fact of life.
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VISIT THESE GREAT TONYA WEB SITES:
PortIce - http://www.geocities.com/portice
David House - http://www.tonyaharding.org
Charlie Main - http://www.charliesweb.com/tonya/tonya.html
Puppetboy - http://www.trinitrotoluene.org/tonya/
Valerie Smith - http://www.olywa.net/radu/valerie/LilHam.html
Swan Lake - http://members.tripod.com/~TonyaHarding/index.html
Blades of Gold - http://members.tripod.com/tmhfan/index.html
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